Trouble with America

Michel Crozier’s The Trouble with America offers a penetrating, Tocquevillian examination of the United States by one of France’s most influential sociologists. Drawing on his first encounters with America in the 1940s—when he discovered a nation of labor idealism, pragmatic management, and ambitious social science—Crozier contrasts the optimism of “happy days” with what he diagnoses in the 1980s as a pervasive legalism and cultural hesitation. The United States, he argues, once taught the world how negotiation, bargaining, and voluntary association could channel conflict into productive change. By the Reagan era, however, those same institutions had become defensive, procedural, and immobilized: unions obsessed with rules, universities dispirited, students self-enclosed, and voluntary associations fragmented into barricades of self-protection. His central themes—the “fear of decision,” the “delirium of due process,” and the loss of “demon virtue”—capture the paradox of a society whose strengths have hardened into constraints.

Part cultural diagnosis, part comparative sociology, and part warning, Crozier’s book illuminates how America’s fixation on rights, transparency, and procedure risks undermining its ability to adapt and govern itself. His vivid illustrations range from postwar union meetings to contemporary student attitudes toward innovation, from environmental opposition to nuclear power to the decline of civic institutions like the PTA. Like Alexis de Tocqueville before him, Crozier speaks as a European admirer both anxious and hopeful: anxious about the consequences of political and intellectual stagnation, but hopeful that America can renew itself by investing in intellectual effort, scientific capacity, and institutional reform. Written in a moment of cultural uncertainty but strikingly prescient today, The Trouble with America challenges policymakers, educators, and civic leaders to reconsider the balance between rights and responsibility, procedure and decision, and to recover the pragmatic energy that once inspired global admiration.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.